Is Tumblr Enjoying A Post-Acquisition Growth Spurt? Not So Fast.

It's been a year since Tumblr became property of
Yahoo. How's it holding up?

The New York Times checks in and concludes: pretty well. "Tumblr, a microblogging platform, has more than doubled its staff to 220, and its audience continues to grow, up 22 percent in the last year, according to the metrics company
comScore," the Times reports.

Yes, actually. Tumblr's traffic is no longer flat. It's down. In terms of unique visitors to Tumblr.com via desktop and mobile web, February and March 2014 saw the lowest totals since the sale. Here's what the data looks like:

Technically, yes, it's accurate to say that Tumblr's audience is up 22% year over year, if you're comparing February 2014 with February 2013. If you're going with the more recent up-to-date March '14 vs. March '13 comparison, it's a more modest 14%.

But to put that in the present tense and say Tumblr "continues to grow" is a bit misleading -- at least if you want to attribute that assertion to comScore data. ComScore measurement is the easiest way to make apples-to-apples comparisons between websites, but Tumblr says it fails to capture its large and growing mobile usage, so it prefers to cite metrics like total engagements, which, it says, are up 45% year-over-year.

I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, ...